


Sylvian

by abbykrieger



Category: Parade's End - All Media Types
Genre: Dialogue, Drabble, Gen, Idleness, Riffing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2014-07-25
Packaged: 2018-02-10 10:02:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2020881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbykrieger/pseuds/abbykrieger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sylvia seems so big to me - magnanimous, at least potentially. I keep imagining it all working out - the whole story working out - into some kind of Bloomsbury arrangement. </p>
<p>Don't own any of this, etc.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sylvian

Had he wanted to be unhappy? Had he merely been reluctant to be happy before her, who had been so voluptuously unhappy before him?

He'd been wholly unprepared for how fast and with what practicality Sylvia arranged the household. As though she knew how to arrange a household. As though she could recognize a boot brush or the underside of a dish. "I'll make any conversion you'll notice," she said.  
"I've noticed them all."  
"One you'll believe." This was at dinner. The roast on its rag-knotted mat.  
"I seem to have swallowed this one." "Ha," she says, slowly. Even Valentine suffering, her face behind the napkin. "Ha ha."

\--

There were still hours for idleness.

"Meeting people's not the trouble. It's getting to know them. Inevitably there's something squalid secret you're let into you'd never want to know."  
"If you know the wrong people."  
"If you know _any_ people." Sylvia fixes her a look, and Valentine feels that wriggly, hooked-fish feeling common to sitters-across-the-table from Mrs. Tietjens of York.  
"I concede it. I do...know people, myself."  
"Good. Then we can fight about something more interesting."  
"Like what?"  
"How about we talk," Sylvia offers, suddenly laughing, "about how you feel about women like me getting the vote?"

...

"Why don't you try..." Valentine's so mixed up with fury she can hardly see. "Have you ever tried reading a book?"  
"I don't know, sometimes I have trouble spelling my name and just leave a mark."  
"I'm not saying you're stupid. I mean...have you ever tried anything to divert yourself besides making other people cry? Or - or bleed."  
Sylvia stops short. She doesn't deny a straight hit, not when it's sincerely shot. Valentine's not an archer of another kind.  
"I get...sick of myself, looking down and being up to the elbows. I'll walk through a room of stuffed shirts and look back upon a trail of corpses."  
"But?"  
"As a general rule they've all deserved it, before now."


End file.
